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A new page for DuPage

Relocated Children's museum caters to tots

Young visitors to the new site of the DuPage Children's Museum in Naperville will be awestruck before they ever enter the building.

The first thing they will see is a 35-foot-tall red door.

"It's an emblem of what we stand for," explains Susan Broad, the museum's executive director, "because we are opening doors for children."

The museum took shape at the beginning of a trend that has not slowed.

"We started in 1987 at a time when there was a surge in children's museums coming into being," says Broad, "and now new children's museums are opening and the original ones are expanding."

People who step through the traditional-size doorway within the gigantic red one will find exhibits that are similiar to those at the museum's old facility in Wheaton, but there are more exhibits now because exhibition space has doubled.

"We consider all the work that was done at the original museum as prototyping for the current one," explains Broad.

Take the AirWorks exhibit, for example. It has continued to evolve ever since it was created three years ago.

"Our research revealed that children thought that fans created air and that they blew it in both directions and that air only existed outside," explains Broad.

So to challenge those misconceptions and others the new museum, is big enough to have a walk-in wind tunnel. It is 5-feet in diameter so youngsters can actually fly a kite inside it. There is now also room for a two-level Air Tower where air blows both up and down.

To explore the concept, kids will have special wands that allow them to use air to move balls around and blow it through organ pipes to make music.

Young carpenters will find that the popular Construction House now has a loft. It is still equipped with real tools, but large pieces of fabric have been added to create hide-aways.

Very young do-it-yourselfers can try their hands at hammering golf tees into pieces of styrofoam in one of the three new Young Explorer areas designed for children under the age of two.

In the expanded WaterWays exhibit tiny tots can snuggle up in a boat filled with fish-shaped pillows and listen to their parents read them books about fish and water.

Bigger kids can play in gently flowing water, pouring it from one container to another and discovering which objects float and which ones sink.

Older children can experiment in another area where they can build dams in a stream and pump 50 gallons of water into a cistern.When it's full, it overflows. This is a moment that inspires "wows" when the water comes rushing down, but it's also an uh-oh moment, as children discover the power of the flowing water, which undoes everything they've built.

This new facility is definitely a place for kids who like to have fun, but Broad points out, "Although we refer to these hands-on, self-directed experiences as play, people also say that play is the work of childhood, so you may not see giddy, laughing faces in the museum but kids with furrowed brows who are concentrating. That is the focus that we are after."